Goldman Sachs Group is looking to expand its workforce in Brazil this year, investing in areas including research, asset management, private banking, sales, investment banking and trading.

The Brazilian unit raised its headcount from 200 to 300 last year, and has plans to keep growing this year by increasing staff by some 20 per cent, according to Bloomberg.

“We have been growing a lot in Brazil over the past couple of years, but we still see significant opportunities to continue to build,” the group’s president, Valentino Carlotti, told the publication. “We have robust growth plans for every product and division.”

Carlotti is set to hand over leadership of the unit in the South American country to Alejandro Vollbrechthausen over the next several months, according to the report.

It is unsurprising that financial services providers with wealth management divisions are increasingly paying attention to Brazil, as the latest figures from Wealth-X show the country has the most ultra-wealthy residents in Latin America.

Ultra high net worth individuals in the region as a whole (those with at least $30 million in investable assets) have reached a total of 15,125 and have a combined net worth of $2.3 trillion. And topping the list with the most number of ultra affluent people is Brazil, followed by Mexico, Argentina, Colombia, and Peru. In fact, around 31 per cent of the region's total number of UHNW individuals are Brazilian, with a combined net worth of $890 billion.